Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Asbestos Head on Religion

Asbestos is very concerned about religion so he tries attending the local God’s Anonymous meetings every week where every weak soul sits in rows, mouth closed, listening to some guy’s interpretation of twelve guy’s interpretations of some guy’s metaphorical teachings from two thousand years ago. He finds this as useful as a hole in the head only more damaging to his brain, so he starts studying theology, philosophy, and the history of metaphysics for himself and finds that it’s this manner of introspection, this questioning of the unanswerable that expands his spiritual awareness and fills him with what some call God’s love, some call peace of mind, and others call crawling from the allegorical cave and seeing the light.

For him the light manifests as a series of realizations regarding the nature of knowledge. Mainly that he knows nothing, and neither does anyone else; including priests, mathematicians, scientists, and all other people using God, Numbers or Formulas to magically boost their ideas from subjective interpretations to Objective Truths.

Asbestos decides it’s his spiritual responsibility to study the thoughts and beliefs of everyone around him and throughout recorded history, because arbitrarily choosing a church or simply inheriting religion is lazy, limiting, and inconsiderate. It’s lazy because you leave spirituality up to genetics or geography. It’s limiting because you loose faith in anything outside your pre-packaged box of beliefs. And it’s inconsiderate because by choosing any exclusive religion you make the decision that all others are wrong.

Even members of the few religions that encourage open practice of other religions are bound to their group identity like poster-children, constantly defending the individuality in their collective faith. But that’s like bragging how modest you are. If you wish a collective relationship with some group’s conception of God, go find the next Holy place, read it’s Holy text, perform some Holy rituals then go home alone feeling like Holy shit, spitting out someone else’s existential excrement. If you wish a personal relationship with God, there’s no religion to follow, no group to join, and no book to read. There’s nothing to do but wander the world ever wondering why, and never decide.

Ultimately, any system that gives answers to metaphysical questions is suspect because it grants Truth to things We can’t know through experience. A more educated approach to the unknown is utter agnostic apostasy: accept you don’t know and couldn’t even know you’re right if you knew it. Spiritual questioning is best left unanswered and simply explored throughout Our lives as We all exist in the mystery.